5 Albums to Stream for Free This Week: Purity Ring, Laetitia Sadier

Welcome to another edition of our regular Monday stream-a-thon, wherein we scour the Internet for good and/or noteworthy releases that you can stream for absolutely nothing. This week, we get in on the action with Purity Ring’s long-awaited debut record, and also rejoice in Laetitia Sadier getting all angry and political again after all these years. Elsewhere, there’s inscrutable sub-aquatic disco from Gatekeeper, a fine album from gravel-voiced antipodean Jack Ladder and, um, that new Passion Pit album. Click through and get in on the action!

We’ve had a promo copy of this for a while, so we’ve had plenty of time to digest its contents. Anyone who’s been entranced by killer single “Belispeak” may be a little disappointed to learn that that song is by far the strongest track here — it’s not that the rest of Shrines is bad, it’s just that it struggles to live up to such a high standard. Still, it’s nevertheless an excellent debut, and you can hear it now at NPR.

Also at NPR, the thoroughly gratifying return of ex-Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier for her second solo album. As the good folk at NPR note, this album is pretty forthright in its politics — indeed, it harks back to her earliest days with Stereolab collaborator and former partner Tim Gane in left-wing indie band McCarthy. It’s good to see Sadier working again, and equally good to see her angry again. Listen here.

Go on, see if you can make any sense of this page. The album’s pretty fine, mind you.

Jack Ladder and the Dreamlanders — Hurtsville

Deep-voiced and remarkably tall singer/songwriter Jack Ladder has been quietly building a fine reputation in his native Australia for the last few years, and it’s a pleasure to see his third record get a release on this side of the Pacific. To the uninitiated, he does sound more than a little like compatriot Nick Cave — as he told Australian online mag Mess+Noise wearily last year, “The Nick Cave thing always gets brought up” — but he’s a fine artist in his own right. Listen here.

You can file us with those who never quite understood the fuss about Passion Pit’s sub-Animal Collective shtick, but still, plenty of people clearly did like Manners, and they will no doubt be excited about the release of the band’s follow-up to that album. It’s entitled Gossamer and it’s out next week, but it’s streaming right now at NPR.